This past Sunday I took the 6:19 am flight to Kahului to preach and celebrate Holy Communion at Kingsfield Anglican Church. They have their service at 10 AM and All Saints has ours at 4 PM so it allows me to be at both parishes in a single Sunday —which is both exhausting and incredibly life-giving.
This week I preached two different sermons: one on Mark 7 at All Saints and one on Acts 9 at Kingsfield (they’ve been going through the Book of Acts for a while now and so I jumped-in where they were in the series). Since the folks at All Saints didn’t get to hear the sermon, I thought I’d post one strand of reflections from my preaching notes:
Acts 9:1-22 has a chiastic structure which means (among other things) that there is a point, hidden in plain sight at the center of the passage which is the heartbeat. Like the conductor of an orchestra, all the music played by the other verses follows the baton of the chiastic center. Leaving the proof of the chiasm to others (like this work done by Richard Snelling at chiasmusxchange), let me jump to the point: the chiastic heart of this section is v.16: “For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”
Most of our Bibles have these little headings over section which were put in their by editors and translators but aren’t actually in the text of Scripture. Often, while perhaps helpful references when looking for a particular passage, they often confuse readers about “the main point of a section” (see my post from a year ago on the chiasm in Mark 1:21-28 here for an example of this). The heading at the top of Acts 9 in my ESV reads “The Conversion of Saul”. Helpful for finding my way around, perhaps, but unhelpful for finding the key the music of the passage in being played in. The “musical key” in which this passage sings is “suffering for the name of Jesus.” And we can think of this is three movements.
I.
Acts 9 picks up with a lot of comedic irony: the enemies of the Gospel of Jesus just can’t seem to kill him. They tried killing him, but he rose again. Ah darn it! Here’s the point: the suffering body of Jesus the rabbi, while killable, doesn’t stay in the grave. And now since the day of Pentecost they’ve been trying to kill the suffering Body of Christ which is the church. The church is his Body. And once again, though they can keep persecuting the Body of Christ, the church just always seems to rise again. The Church doesn’t stay dead.
Saul, last time we met him was watching-over Stepehen’s martyrdom, filled with the zeal to see him die. But then, after Stephen’s death, what happens? Does the church die? No! More and more and more folks are coming to the Lord. Acts 8 ends with the Gospel being preached to all the towns from Azotus to Caesarea (v.40).
Saul is frustrated for the same reason the Ethiopean eunuch is perplexed (cf. Acts 8:26-39): how can the Messiah be the Suffering Servant? How can what is killed and persecuted rise again? Why won’t the Body of Jesus stay in the grave?
II.
Invested with authority to round-up Christians in Damascus and bring them bound to Jerusalem, Saul heads out on the road. A light from heaven and a loud voice break-in to his pilgrimage thoughts. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Here’s the answer to Saul’s riddle! “Light from heaven” and a voice speaking to him should remind us of Sinai, where the God of Israel spoke to his people from a fire and lightning and myriads of angels in martial array, and smoke, and brightness, and the sound of trumpets (cf. Ex. 19:16-19). This is the God of Israel encountering him in glory —everything Saul has purportedly wanted in his life has come to him. But wait, something’s wrong… what did the voice say? “Me?” Persecuting “me?” What?
Jesus claims that Saul’s persecution of the Church is the persecution of the Lord Himself. We are his Body, afterall. Just as Christ said that when we serve the least we serve him (cf. Matt. 25:40), so also when persecution arises for the church it is he who is being persecuted.
Saul encounters here on the Damascus road the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. But he also realizes something else —he has already encountered the Suffering Servant Jesus Christ each and every time he encountered his persecuted church.
III.
Saul and his men are blind and mute (his mean can’t say anything cf. v.7) —unspeaking and unseeing just like the idols they have worshiped in their hearts, as the psalms and prophets warned them (cf. 135:16-18).
Saul is commanded to “Go!” This time it is into the city to wait for Ananias and for baptism. But this marks the beginning of the rest of Saul’s life in which he will constantly answer the call of the Lord to “Go!” Whil he waits Saul becomes like a dead man: neither eating nor drinking for 3 days. He becomes what he has always been: dead, hungry, thirsty. At last Saul is being honest on the outside about his condition on the inside.
Ananias is told that the Lord wants to show Saul “how much he will suffer for my name.” Saul will move past the initial shocking encounter on the road and will enter fully into the sufferings of Jesus. He will be one who suffers for the name of Jesus. He will be incorporated into the Body of Jesus —the Body that died and rose again, and which dies and rises through-out every age in the Church. Saul is baptized into the death of Jesus and shares in his resurrection glory (Rom. 6:4-11; Col. 3:1-17; Phil. 3:10). He shares in the sufferings of Jesus.
This is where we are prone to miss the climax of the story, if we are not careful! Chiastic center is not the same as crescendo. Chiasm is “meaning” or “key” while crescendo is “finale” or “zenith.” The bright light from heaven is not the crescendo, nor is the rest of the narrative a lengthy denouement (like the end of Tombstone [1993] after Doc Holiday dies). No! Here’s the crescendo: “Then he rose and was baptized; and taking food, he was strengthened” (v18b-19). Hallelujah!
The Suffering Body of Christ raises the dead. Saul is reborn. A prodigal has come home. Water has turned to wine. The Law of stone has become the law of flesh. A sinner has become a saint. An enemy has become beloved. This is the real miracle. Lights? Smoke? Voice from heaven? Sure that stuff is great, but it is nothing compared to the joyous wonder of a human being reborn by water and the Spirit.
All the suffering Saul will endure later as Paul, and as a member of the Body of Jesus, is nothing compared to the sweet delights of being one with Him: “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Phil. 3:8).
You too are a part of this suffering Body of Jesus. And all our sufferings, in all of the little ways we suffer in this Body together, are all worth it; and all the stings of our sorrows are not as sharp as the joy of the Kingdom “where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness” (Tolkien, The Return of the King, 933).